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By Root 908 0

of a telepsychic to picture a pair of New Yorker arch druids such as James Wood and Louis Menand—or any of the cybernetic brains from newer literary journals such as n+1, or the policy wonkers seated across from PBS’s Charlie Rose debating the merits of Sara Mearns versus Tiler Peck (two of the premier principal dancers in New York City Ballet’s current roster) under a rain-sheltering awning on West Sixty-sixth, or co-analyzing the recombinant geometry of Balanchine’s choreography for the corps, its mandala designations. Longtime friends once fell out for good disagreeing over the degrees of goddess stature of their favorite dancers, over a specific ballet interpretation. The fraternal relationship between Garis and the over-volted Haggin (a classic grievance collector who detected hostility with every cilium of his being) irreparably ruptured over, among other things, the super-supremacy of Balanchine’s final, greatest muse, Suzanne Farrell. “[Not] that he disliked Farrell, for he admired her greatly, but … she did not seem to him as transcendently special and new as she did to us.” It was hell on the digestion, breaking with a former comrade, as it must have been back in the Trotsky era. Even after Farrell temporarily left the company, the rift remained, the worry of being targeted by assassin eyes. “This is the point at which my following the Balanchine Enterprise began to drift … even the physical experience of going to the ballet had become difficult since I had to be on guard not to run into Haggin.”

Similar animosities rake the edges of the ballet scene today—rival cliques retiring to opposing corners in the lobby, former buddies giving each other the leper treatment, veiled insults pressed into print like thin cheese slices—but only among the shrinking band of professional dance critics, its more partisan combatants and embittered shrunken heads. Literary critics with the pebbled subtlety and ardor of Garis and Mudrick interested in ballet or any performing art have become nearly extinct (literary critics of any word grain not exactly a going thing). Today’s intellectual homeys are inserted so snugly into their visors of expertise that they patrol their particular beat like RoboCop, perhaps finding ballet too frilly for their brawny brains. Or they may have “issues” with the body ideals in ballet and gender representation, since everyone loves having issues as an excuse to stay home and darn their egos. Were a fledgling Irving Howe or Richard Poirier to flirt with an interest in ballet, there’d be no high lama for him to look up to for divine guidance, no Edwin Denby or Arlene Croce whose dance expertise serves as airfield beacon.

Croce’s arrival at The New Yorker was a signature moment for the magazine and for dance criticism, another masterstroke by the editor William Shawn. In the seventies, The New Yorker was at the pinnacle of its cultural influence, and Croce’s head-held-high prose and persona only extended the elevation. Reading Arlene, you never felt that her responses were saw-toothed by warring impulses, that ambivalences dug into her critical formulations and left tiny divots of doubt. In this she was unlike Pauline, for whom contrarieties were part of the jazzy rush of sorting out what you felt and thought. Witty, adventurous, mordant, occasionally slangy as Arlene could be (“In spite of its yuckiness, the Sacre remains in memory as the only tolerable [Pina] Bausch piece”), her New Yorker essay-reviews—like those of the art critic Harold Rosenberg or the literary critic George Steiner—radiated a fine chill of infallibility, which could have its own perfect-martini invigoration in the untucked seventies. She removed the valentine lace from dance writing that had gussied and gauded it up in the journalistic past with platitudes and sugarplum superlatives, covering dance as the demanding, exacting, grown-up art it was, not a rest-stop for tired minds wanting to look at legs. Her column seemed to have its own proscenium arch, a tremor of expectancy that heightened the stakes. She eagle-eyed why Suzanne